Discover + Share: The Best of 2017

This year marked the first year for Discover + Share, a new blog from the Missouri Botanical Garden. Our goal was to give visitors a glimpse of the Garden most don’t often get to see or experience–to share our stories and help you learn a little more about the many facets of the Garden’s mission. In fact, the term discover and share comes directly from our mission statement, “To discover and share knowledge about plants and their environment in order to preserve and enrich life.”

Since launching this spring, we’ve welcomed over 17,000 visitors to the site. Here is a glimpse at some of our most popular posts of 2017.

The Great American Eclipse took the country by storm this summer. All three of the Garden’s campuses were in the path of totality on August 21st. Shaw Nature Reserve, which had more than two minutes of totality, welcomed thousands of visitors for this historic event.

Our “Garden of Pure, Clear Harmony and Peace” celebrated a big birthday this year. July 7, 2017 marked the 40th anniversary of Seiwa-en Japanese Garden. Hundreds of visitors helped us mark the historic occasion by taking part in our Instagram photo contest.

2017 brought major change to Shaw Nature Reserve. The Garden appointed Dr. Quinn Long as the new director of the Gray Summit campus. He succeeds long-time director John Behrer, who retired this fall after nearly 40 years at Shaw Nature Reserve. Deb Frank, who served as Vice President of Sustainability and Shaw Nature Reserve, also retired this year.

One of the Garden’s oldest buildings has been undergoing quite the transformation this year. Crews have been painstakingly rehabbing Henry Shaw’s Museum to make it once again accessible to the public. The monumental effort has yielded a few surprises along the way, too.

The Garden’s Peter H. Raven Library has an incredible collection of rare books, but none garnered more attention this year than The Florist. The discovery of this 256-year-old coloring book attracted national media coverage.

This summer, thousands of visitors joined us to experience the rare bloom of ‘Octavia’ the corpse flower. But other plants with unpleasant odors can be sniffed out throughout the Garden grounds. Meet the corpse flower relatives providing their own special stink.

Bonus

The Discover+Share blog is just one of the many ways we share the Garden with the public. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and more. Our most popular post of 2017 was a video of the beautiful effects of an ice storm on January 13th.